I own an Atari 800 and I am perplexed about how to access all the colors in graphics mode 8. The only graphics color I can get is white. How do you access the other colors?

Rod MacPherson

GRAPHICS 8, like GRAPHICS 0, is a two-color mode. You can display a character or a pixel in either the background color or a different shade (luminance) of the background color. So the only nonbackground color you get in GRAPHICS 8 is COLOR 1. Due to the way TV pictures are drawn, the tiny pixels can appear in different colors, depending on what column they are in (this is often called artifacting). You can extend your color options this way, but we can't go into the details here. There is plenty of information on artifacting and other graphics modes in COMPUTE!'s First Book of Atari Graphics.